In the last few years, I’ve had quite the journey. AdKeeper, shot for the stars, and fell on the moon. I worked with some fantastic folks there, and did quite well – but alas, they pivoted, and it was time to move on. I don’t believe I’ve been fully, professionally, “happy” since those days.

I’ve done some hopping around, I suppose you could say: I’ve been doing some professional soul searching, looking for the next big thing. I’ve had a few short stints with some various companies, and found myself in The Big Apple working for a company called TargetSpot.

I thought I would have been with TargetSpot longer, as, it was a really fantastic group of people, though, general unhappy life circumstances ( loved and lost would be an understatement ) shifted me another direction. As of April this year, I’ve taken a dive back to my roots in startup.

I now consult for startups spread across the U.S. and globe. To date this year, I’ve now worked with clients in Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Western Maryland, California, and couple in the UK. You do a lot in startups…

I’ve dedicated myself to helping entrepreneurs kick off new ideas through research, building version 1 products, maintaining existing projects, and have also kicked off some of my own ideas that are now slowly growing with small amounts of customers.

These are exciting times!

I’ve traveled over 15,000 miles this year, for various reasons, much of the process has been in the vein of building multiple technology businesses. Most of these are in the earliest of stages, and, for the time being, I will not list them – but I am quite excited about all the projects I get to be part of as a consulting engineer and co-founder to many.

In my professional soul searching, I’ve also done some personal soul searching. As, you can see… this was largely about “what makes me happiest”. A few of the many phrasings I’ve picked up along the way, shared here:

“You want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” – Unknown

“Money comes, money goes” – A friend

“It looks as if you are trying to climb out of hell on a wooden ladder…” – A friend

“Religion is for those who don’t want to go to hell, Spirituality is for those who have already been there” – Someone

And likely the most important thing I’ve learned about myself is that my intuition always seems to know. So I add this:

“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary” – Steve Jobs

and leave you with this…

“The world needs less workers dreaming, and more dreamers working” – Me

CLinkPager and Twitter Bootstrap

I first googled around to see a quick way mesh the two, and was surprised to find that most examples try to extend CLinkPager widget. This didn’t seem right to me. Yii, is generally a pretty flexible when it comes to stylization and themes; I knew there must be a better way…

I dug into the CLinkPager class myself, and turns out, there is a much simpler way to make Yii’s pagination class styled like bootstrap, and it can be done entirely in the widget options in the view file, without extending anything. See the following:

Configure Widgets Globally

Now that we know how to style our CLinkPager widget with bootstrap, one realizes that repeating those options for a site that has pagination all over the place in a copy paste fashion is sub optimal. What if I need to change a style slightly for several places?

No worries. Yii offers the ability to globally configure widgets, and further override global configuration as needed for specific widgets.

A friend turned me onto a new game, League of Legends. It’s a real time strategy (RTS) where you choose from any of over 100+ different characters, team up in groups of 3-5, and duke it out on interactive maps for territory. Games generally last 20-45 mins, and you are rewarded with in-game points to help level up your abilities. If anybody wants to play with me sometime, signup using the link below ( I get in-game points for referrals ), and hit me up, lets play!

I spent some time Googling around for javascript injection techniques, and stumbled on a neat little bookmarklet that allows you to inject jQuery into any website, and then use the FireBug console to play around with the page. In addition to how much fun this is, having the smooth jQuery syntax at your fingertips mixed in with FireBug is a great debugging technique for developers.

I’d like to write up a bit more on this at a later time, but moving quickly.. a quick way to inspect an element on the DOM is to use Firefox’s Inspect Element tool. It’s very handy for quickly figuring out the CSS selectors and attributes belonging to an element on the page, as well as checking for value changes when working with a dynamic page.

A few years ago, I put out a series of articles on tech forums describing some of my thoughts on building social networks, and choosing the best technology. I made some comparisons between Rails, Django, and PHP Frameworks, off the shelf CMS like Drupal or WordPress. Not all statements, I would say were accurate at the time ( I may be jaded from bad experiences ), or even today – but the general idea was in the right place.

A few years have gone by ( too fast ), and many of my philosophies have, hopefully matured, changed a little. I tend to slander technologies less, for starters, unless your Drupal, and do more looking at the problem domain and explore what technology can elegantly solve for to get me there, instead of brute forcing my favorite technology and hoping it will keep me there.

Tonight, I received an email from a fellow startup enthusiast, Michael, seeking some further thought on the matter, as he is embarking on a project. After editing my response to him, over and over, I decided, it was worth sharing.

Michael, in his quest to choose the best technology for the job, was stuck between choosing an off the shelf solution, BuddyPress or going completely custom from scratch with CodeIgniter (CI) to build a social network. BuddyPress didn’t quite have all the features he wanted, but did have some, and CI, of course, would be a mostly from scratch endeavor.

Michael stumbled upon one of my notes on the CI forums, and sent me an email asking “How does he choose which will be best?”

My response:

Hi Michael,

Thanks for reaching out to me. I have to say, I’ve received a lot of feedback on my thoughts about this, and I will first admit, I wrote that note on the CI forums several years ago, if I were to write it again, I think I could do you one better. However, I think a lot of the motivation behind it still holds true in my experience, so let me give you some of my thoughts from today, and you will have to task yourself in choosing which specific technology meets your requirement.

Lets spark some thoughts:

Are you hiring a team or programming yourself?

What types of resources do you have available to achieve a finished product ( either that be your own graphics and programming skill, friends helping, a hired team, skill level, experience ).

What type of timeline are you looking at?

If you have a hired team, do you have the budget and buffer for when things don’t come out the way you expected? Going custom can have it’s unexpected draw backs and expenditure, while an off the shelf solution might get you to market faster at the cost of not being “quite” what you want in the big picture.

All Code is Throw Away

“All code is throw away” – Peter Meulbroek. A dear friend of mine, mentor, and also former boss, taught me this concept over the course of about 3 years. It’s one of my biggest take aways from working closely with him.

Be ready to try again. To not get it quite right. To give a little, so you can take a little more.

Often, the best thing you can do, is build a beta or prototype. See if it catches. Don’t spend all your resources in one basket and hope it’s the next best thing. If you can get a prototype, you can gauge what to do to sustain, maybe pursue further investment, or decide to throw it out! Going with an off the shelf solution is often a “fast” way to go and provides this sort of testing ground with low expense. Then when the concept is proven, rewrite it on a more customizable platform with all those features you dream of, ramp up infrastructure, resources, budget, etc.

I’ve rewritten entire projects with tens of thousands of lines of code, in different technologies, languages, platforms, you name it, in some cases, 3-4 times in a year. Some of the reasons generally being:

the requirements evolved

the budget increased or decreased

we pulled and added features that we found more or less important

users hated it and nobody used it

users loved it so much we hit a technical wall or limitation

overhead was not worth investment for particular features

Famous Last Words

Think about these items, and then ask yourself what is important to you in this first iteration ( attention to the word “first” ):

Features

Quality

Speed

Take a combination of 2, and choose which framework/platform gets you that. Then, be prepared to change your mind, evolve, and throw away a little code ( or all of it sometimes ) in favor of what gets you to the big picture in the end.

I really think this has a lot of potential to kick off. You know those customer feedback cards in restaurants and hotels that you’re asked to fill out once in awhile? And every once in awhile you do? This takes that concept to the new century, using cell phones.

Imagine sitting in a restaurant, and the bathroom is just gross – you text anonymously to a number that you notice on a card laid out on the table, the feedback is sent to the owner, manager on staff, etc, instantly and anonymously. They can very quickly, either respond, or remedy the problem, or likely ( and hopefully in this scenario ), both. Now – it doesn’t have to be bad feedback, it can actually be good feedback too — ie: “Sally is a wonderful waitress, she really went above and beyond, thank you, we’ll be back”, etc.

It’s a great tool for businesses to dig down into what’s happening in their business. Particularly if the upper management is more removed, ie, chain owners.

I talked to a few businesses about this while I was out and about earlier this week, and sure enough, there was interest. I think a huge win for TalkToTheManager is if a hotel chain grabs this – then you are gold sir.

The service is $15/month for businesses, and free for end-users. Check it out. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see this somewhere sometime in the near future.

Two colleagues out of St Louis, Josh Anyan, and Chris DeGroat, recently created n3rds.com – a website for matching up tech industry jobs with candidates. They gave me a heads up, and I was pretty impressed – as I generally am by these two. I thought I’d give them a call out on my site in hopes to send them what little traffic I can muster. Here is a review:

n3rds.com aims to be low friction, my entire experience on the site was just a few minutes, here are some highlights:

The login system is all via the linkedIn API ( how suitable ). This makes it super easy to sign up, and connect with the most relevant professional social network out there – NOT your facebook.

Next, your taken to a listing of matching jobs – where you can pick and choose what interests you and go from there.

As new jobs that match your skills come into the system, you are notified. This is a nice way to keep a pulse on opportunities, without throwing your resume on the market.

n3rds.com launched a few days ago and is currently in beta. If you’re a recruiter or employer, head on over and toss up a few job postings. It’s free! If you’re a techie, might as well sign up – it’s pretty frictionless, and you never know where you’ll find the next big thing.

For the record: Chris DeGroat and Josh Anyan are rockstar developers, they knocked this product out in just a couple short weeks. Keep tabs on these guys.

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” – Thomas Jefferson

Ok folks! This is the largest online protest in history, and for good cause. Two bills, that threaten internet freedom, are infront of Congress with alot of support, SOPA and PIPA. A quote from Google’s take action page:

“Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.

Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA.

The Senate will begin voting on January 24th. Please let them know how you feel. Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.”

North Korea was blacking out the internet before it was cool.

Food for thought: Would you rather your children grow up in North Korea, or the free world? Better get on board folks.